I disagree that the "blogosphere" is dead. The rise of TechCrunch, HuffPo, etc. have succeeded in increasing blog readership. The personal voices are still out there, are still part of the conversation.
As usual, Nicholas Carr goes on his big rant against what he deems blogs and the blogosphere. Ironically, his rant basically validates blogs as being ubiquitous now, and being embraced by both the average internet user and big publishing companies.
The blogosphere is not dead. Just like I used to ignore "mainstream media", I now also ignore blogs that are owned by big media companies. The Internet is what you make of it -- if you just do what's popular, then you are only going to see popular things. Duh.
i would be interested in rescuetime publishing aggregated user data, showing the fastest growing web destinations. i mean, if the buzz about blog has died, where are people going to instead? what's the hottest thing?